How I Built a 40,000-Member Design Community in MENA

By Osama Khalil · July 3, 2026 · Amman & Riyadh

In August 2018, I stood in a room in Amman watching designers sweat over poster briefs while a countdown clock ticked behind them. There was no prize money and nobody was handing out swag. People showed up anyway, because nobody had ever asked them to compete in public before.

That night became Design Battlefield, and Design Battlefield grew into a community that now counts more than 40,000 members across Jordan and Saudi Arabia. I want to write down how that actually happened, partly because people keep asking me, and partly because most of what I read about community building skips the unglamorous years.

It started before the battlefield

Three years earlier, in 2015, I co-founded Design Family, a design education initiative that ended up serving more than 1,000 designers. We ran sessions, mentored beginners, and answered the same starter questions over and over. I must have explained portfolio basics a hundred times, and I tried to explain them the hundredth time the way I did the first. That repetition mattered more than any single workshop: people came back because someone was reliably there. Design Family later earned a fellowship at Badir and a TV segment, but what it really produced was trust. When I launched something new in 2018, a thousand designers already knew my name meant I would show up for them.

Why a battlefield?

Design education in our region had plenty of talks and workshops. What we didn't have was anywhere for a young designer to test themselves under pressure and be seen doing it. So instead of another lecture, I built a competition: real briefs, tight deadlines, judging in front of the whole room. I called it Design Battlefield, معركة التصميم.

The first edition was about posters. Over the next four years the series ran for eight editions, each one a different discipline: packaging, Bauhaus-inspired design, merchandise, branding, communication design, book design, and finally wall murals in Saudi Arabia.

By the end of the eighth edition, the numbers looked like this:

• 8 editions between 2018 and 2022
• more than 5,000 attendees across the events
• more than 40,000 community members across our platforms
• participants from 4 countries: Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia

Going regional, then going Gulf

The 2021 branding edition raised the project's ceiling. For the first time, designers from Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen competed in the same edition, and a hackathon born in an Amman co-working space suddenly stretched across three countries.

Then came Saudi Arabia. I moved there for work and landed in the middle of a design scene growing faster than anything I had seen, pushed by Vision 2030's spending on creative industries. The Wall Design Battlefield in 2022 brought the format to the Kingdom, with designers painting murals instead of pushing pixels.

It was never only hackathons

People know the battlefield, but a lot of the community's growth happened elsewhere.

She Designer put women designers on stage as speakers and role models, and its events got TV coverage on Alordon Al Youm and Amman TV. I started it after noticing how few women applied to speak at our other events. Half of your future community is quietly watching to see whether they are actually invited, and a speaker lineup answers that question louder than any caption.

The Farid Omara talk in Amman sold out at double the venue's capacity, with more than 500 people in the room. That night convinced me our designers were not short on ambition. They were short on access: serious speakers, in their own city, in their own language.

Ftoor Designer, the podcast I co-host, is the community's breakfast table. Ftoor means breakfast, and the show is exactly that: long, unhurried conversations with designers and creatives. When events pause, the conversations keep the community warm.

I also kept building products for the same audience, like Ruzma for freelancers and OneDesigner for matching clients with designers. None of them were planned as community strategy. They were things the same people kept needing.

What I learned about community building

1. Give people a stage. Watching a talk asks nothing of you. Competing in front of a room full of your peers is terrifying, and it is exactly why people came back.
2. Consistency beats scale. Eight smaller editions over four years built more trust than one huge event would have. The people who competed in edition two brought their friends to edition five.
3. You cannot buy the attention that matters. Al-Arabi TV covered the poster edition because 5,000 people cared about it. We never had a press budget.
4. Change the container, keep the job. Hackathons, talks, a podcast, products. The job underneath was always to bring designers together and push them forward.
5. Go where the energy is. Jordan raised this community. Saudi Arabia is where it grows next. Accepting that felt strange at first, but communities outgrow their birthplace, and holding one back out of nostalgia helps nobody.

What's next

These days I work where AI meets design, integrating AI into brand and marketing workflows. My bet is the same one this community was built on: technology should make design more human. The battlefield will be back. I don't know yet which discipline or which city, but it will be back.

Building a community, a brand, or an event series in MENA and want help? I've done it a few times. Reach me at ok@osama.me or start at the homepage.